A Brief History of Hackerdom

Eric Steven Raymond

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify
this document under the terms of the Open Publication License,
version 2.0.

$Date: 2002/08/02 08:21:12 $

Revision History

Revision 1.24

25 August 2000

esr

First DocBook version.

Revision 1.23

29 Dec 1999

esr

This version went into the first printed edition.

Revision 1.20

17 August 1999

esr

First SGML version with bibliography.

Revision 1.1

15 Feb 1997

esr

This document dates from around 1992, but was not
version-controlled until 1997.

Abstract

I explore the origins of the hacker culture, including
prehistory among the Real Programmers, the glory days of the MIT
hackers, and how the early ARPAnet nurtured the first network nation.
I describe the early rise and eventual stagnation of Unix, the new
hope from Finland, and how `the last true hacker' became the next
generation's patriarch. I sketch the way Linux and the mainstreaming
of the Internet brought the hacker culture from the fringes of public
consciousness to its current prominence.

Prologue: The Real Programmers

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

That's not what they called themselves. They didn't call themselves
`hackers', either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet `Real
Programmer' wasn't coined until after 1980, retrospectively by one of
their own. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing
attracted many of the world's brightest and most creative minds. From
Eckert and Mauchly's first ENIAC computer onward there was a more or
less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of enthusiast
programmers, people who built and played with software for fun.

The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics
backgrounds. They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore
white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded
in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient
languages now forgotten.

From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, in the great days of
batch processing and the ``big iron'' mainframes, the Real Programmers
were the dominant technical culture in computing. A few pieces of
revered hacker folklore date from this era, including various lists of
Murphy's Laws and the mock-German ``Blinkenlights'' poster that still
graces many computer rooms.

Some people who grew up in the `Real Programmer' culture
remained active into the 1990s and even past the turn of the 21st
century. Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers,
was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire
operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design
through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And
it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.

The `Real Programmer' culture, though, was heavily associated with
batch (and especially batch scientific) computing. It was eventually
eclipsed by the rise of interactive computing, the universities, and
the networks. These gave birth to another engineering tradition that,
eventually, would evolve into today's open-source hacker culture.